New items

I was thinking about adding several new items, primarily pieces of equipment, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on them.

helm of telecontrol
* Naturally grants teleport control. I would love to have some other magical helms than only stat-up ones and this one would make a nice substitue of the ring.

helm of telepathy
* Grants ESP.
* Again, a substitute for the amulet. Might be nice if you don't have permanent ESP, as it does not prevent you from wearing AoLS.

amulet of magic breath
* Grants gas immunity.
* I don't think the gas mask needs to be the only way of gaining permanent gas immunity, and amulet is a good slot for this, as it will compete with AoLS and warding.

amulet of speed
* Grants haste. Now of this one I'm not sure, as it seems quite good. Do we want to have a permanent haste on equipment?
* Maybe never generated, only wishable?

dragon cuirass
* This is an armor from CLIVAN which I really like - it is a dragon hide armor that cannot break, but neither can be SoCM'd. (Actually in CLIVAN it can be SoCM'd, but that's a bug as far as I know.)
* I think the no-SoCM balances this nicely. Also should be rare.

belt of giant strength
* Increases both AStr and LStr by enchantment.
* Basically a counterweight to belt of levitation - now there is simply no competition. I would like to have at least one item that can compete in the belt slot.

In a similar vein, there was some discussion a while back about giving rings and amulets random materials. I would like that, because having rings randomly made of iron, wood or bone would each make for interesting situations. What do you think?

These mostly seem a little bit powerful so I'll try and add a little IVAN flavor here for balance/humor:

Helm of telecontrol:
-Not sure we actually need this with the rings around. I do like the idea of having more interesting and varied helmets, but I don't think we need to have a tele-helmet unless it does something better than the rings like preventing equipment from vanishing from your body.

Helm of telepathy:
-Grants ESP... but the helmet has no eye holes, so you can't see. PER 1. This preserves the (imo good) difficult decision of whether to use ESP or AoLS because the amulet of ESP doesn't mess with your stats. Not being able to see isn't too heavy a penalty because you'll be able to sense (most) enemies and you can always take the helmet off if you need to.

Amulet of magic breath:
-I like this idea actually, no further comments. I have also considered whether adding a consumable item that grants temporary gas immunity would be a good idea. Currently the only way to temporarily get gas immunity is through volatile magic effects like magic fart clouds and eating mushrooms.

Amulet of Speed:
-The amulet is made out of bone or ommel tooth and is also hasted at all times.

Dragon Cuirass:
-Would probably be a good treasure for the dragon tower (or found elsewhere to prepare for it?) Otherwise doesn't need any changes.

Belt of Giant Strength:
-I'm not sure having this is such a good idea in general - also it reminds me of LIVAN's thieves' girdle which was really useful. Perhaps a good penalty for this would be that it also weighs a tonne - now it really is the counterweight to the belt of levitation

Item idea: The Magical Lampshade. Made of Illithium, indestructable, weights in the neighborhood of 500g, and is a permanent light source. Slightly brighter than an oil lamp.

Why? So I can have an indestructible light source that isn't liable to be stolen by magpies, and doesn't weigh 3 kilos.

I'm wary of adding stuff like this, since LIVAN and CLIVAN were so out of balance. Happily we can add dungeon tags in the code right now, so that the dragon cuirass generates only in the dragon tower for example.

I completely agree that it would be powerful, as dragon hide is a good material and unbreaking armor is... well, good. If dragon tower is coming one day, it would definitely make a nice specific piece of gear.

On a whim, while feeling a bit seasonal, I made a Grand Stollen Knife of Attnam, based on that of Dresden (link), and put it in the golden chest in the treasury.

It's a unique two-handed scimitar with extra primary and secondary volume, extra damage, and less accuracy, and it's made of gold with a silver handle (Dresden's is silver plated).

I mostly added it so that there would be something existing in the game that says "unbelievably inaccurate". It can be SoCMed if you manage to steal it, but even with an arcanite or octiron blade it still needs enchantment to be a viable weapon. With valpurium or mithril it also needs very high arm strength.

For some reason the shopkeeper would only pay about 400 gold for it.

He wouldn't be a shopkeeper if he didn't know how to buy low and sell high after all.

Har har! Where's the merge request? Go on, I want it in time for Christmas release

Here it is: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/pull/222

Awesome work on the Stollen Knife

Thanks I guess the stollen it's meant to cut would be filled with banana flesh rather than marzipan...

I assume it would be banana bread

One more item I would like to take from CLIVAN to vanilla is the werewolf fur cloak.

Here are a few Ideas I had :

Amulet of Hedgehogs : An amulet that grants the Spiny status to the wearer.

Staff of summoning : A quarterstaff that sometimes summons random friendly monsters on hit (the frequency of the effect is based on CHA and the monsters you get is based on INT) with the message "The staff of summoning pulls a [Monster] from another dimension !". After some time the monster disappears with the message "[Monster] was returned to it's dimension".

Magical flippers : A pair of "boots" that allows you to swim through water cases in the overworld. Doing so trains ASTR and LSTR but every tile travelled greatly exhausts stamina. If you drop to Fainting on a water tile you will drown and die.

Helmet of Dragons : A dragon hide full helmet (maybe a new named artifact ?) that has a chance of making you breath fire on the tile in front of you every time you attack, dealing fire damage to whatever is there and setting it on fire. (the fire damage is fixed, much like with the flaming swords)

I guess I'll add one more:

Monk's belt

Worn, this belt grants its enchantment to your unarmed attacks (on top of any enchantment from eg. gloves) and negates extra damage from enemies striking your unarmored body parts. It also grants you a chance to dodge attacks based on how low your equipment load is - the less weight you have equipped (including any weapons etc.), the better you can dodge. Basically allows you to play an effective unarmed and unarmored character.

sounds kind of cool. Maybe make the poiwers work only when wearing cloth armor?

I would rather link it all to equipment weight. Making it cloth-only would be hard with different types of cloth (cloth and expensive fabric, or what about hair-type materials?).

Then again maybe the weight restriction moves IVAN into lockstep with other major roguelikes in regards to monks. This could be an opporunity to rethink the way a roguelike handles monks.

They should carry a barrel full of Valdemar on their back and make sound whenever they read anything, but as compensation they can manually copy scrolls. Also they have the masochist flag and attack themselves with a whip if they spend an hour without praying.

We would need:
New barrel item
Blank scrolls
Attack self command
Talking out loud whilst reading subsystem